No SQUIT when it comes to Scrabble

Doing his letters: 16-year-old Melbourne schoolboy David Eldar is
currently placed 33rd out of 100 players at the World Scrabble
Championships in London.Photo: Julian Andrews

November 20, 2005

A Melbourne boy does battle in a war of words on the world
stage. Annabel Crabb reports from London.

IT'S the World Scrabble Championships in London, and the rising
young Australian Scrabble star David Eldar is nervous. The
16-year-old schoolboy is placed fourth in the Australian ratings,
and this is his first WSC.

It's day two of competition and Peter Armstrong, an American
super-Scrabbler who looks like Pete Sampras, is facing off against
Ganesh Asirvatham, a 26-year-old powerhouse from Malaysia.
Armstrong whacks down GYRI on a triple-word score (44 points)
 impressive enough. Even more impressive when you take into
account the fact that GYRI is stacked on top of MIAOU in the
board's congestion, which in turn is stacked on top of PODESTA.
Read downwards, it is GAE, YOS and RUT. Surely they're taking the
piss?

A quick scan around some of the other boards provides sinister
depth to this suspicion. No one in a domestic game could get away
with COWY, for example  or TOGE, SQUIT, KIBEI, or QUAERE
 all of which are in evidence among the professionals.

Ambitious endings for ordinary words are popular too  I
watch a bearded chap clear his tile rack by putting down PAWNAGES,
and feel a savage and unreasonable surge of joy when he is rewarded
from the Scrabble bag with a barren desert of consonants looking
like nothing so much as an obscure Serbian placename.

Philip Nelkon, conference organiser and British champion of
1978, 1981, 1990 and 1992, confirms that many of the players do not
know the meanings of the words they use. Defending world champion,
Thai student Panupol Sujjayakorn, has memorised the English
dictionary but does not speak English conversationally.

"It's a disadvantage, but not as much as you might think," says
Mr Nelkon. "As a native English speaker, you might know perhaps 25
per cent of the words on the board."

Computer programs have revolutionised Scrabble. Where players
once relied on dictionaries, they can now use Scrabble software to
generate lists of handy words  four-letter-words ending with
J, for instance.

Thai and American players face a disadvantage at the WSC 
their competitions use a different dictionary, with about 20,000
fewer words. So they simply learn the extra 20,000 words for this
tournament and forget them on their return home.

Naturally, there is a very serious atmosphere in the Marriott
Hotel, King Henry's Road, North London, where the tournament's
gruelling 25 rounds will offer up a champion late tonight,
Australian time. Competitors are overwhelmingly male (there are
five female players out of 100) and the dress code is relaxed
 pants are worn high and Scrabble World Championship
windcheaters from earlier years are widely employed.

There have been no board-tippings or major incidents yet, aside
from the events of Thursday, when former world champion and current
North American champion Joel Sherman was mugged on a London street,
losing his laptop and personal word lists. He is battling on,
regardless.

All four Australians are doing well. Twenty-five-year-old
Melbourne accountant Naween Fernando is placed third as of Friday
night, while Sydney lawyer Paul Cleary is eighth. Melbourne auditor
Andrew Fisher is at number 12 and David Eldar is performing well
for a rookie at 33.

Over on table four, Paul Cleary is tackling the second-placed
player, India's Akshay Bhandarkar, and it's a taut contest. Cleary
places the letters C-R-I-M-P down from the upper-north edge of the
board, and reaches for another. Is it possible that he is planning
to test the existing prohibition on proper nouns by invoking the
Aussie Chicken Crimpy? Nope  it turns out to be CRIMPLE, an
apparently legitimate word that means "to contract, or curl". Good
one, Paul. Unfortunately, Bhandarkar responds with terminal
Scrabbology, using the C to form ACONITES across two triple-word
scores, exhausting all seven letters and getting 140 points.

Cleary rallies bravely, but Bhandarkar strikes again with his
last shot, spelling DOTTLED, which clearly should be disqualified
but isn't, even after a formal challenge from Cleary.

Cleary repairs outside for a remorseful ciggie, cursing himself.
"At this level, I shouldn't be making errors like that," he
laments. "I should have had a better end-game prepared. I knew
there were eight letters left in the bag, and I knew there was a J
in the bag. I assumed he'd picked up the J, which is an awful
letter, but he hadn't."

Cleary is a traditionalist with a breathtaking vocabulary, but
he accepts that the modern game is all about rote-learning words.
"Why learn meanings, when you can just learn more words?"

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Doing his letters: 16-year-old Melbourne schoolboy David Eldar is
currently placed 33rd out of 100 players at the World Scrabble
Championships in London.